Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop

Post by rhizome » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 1:53 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #257

nothal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's relatively common for governments to prohibit businesses and services from discriminating against certain types of users, why do you think it's ridiculous in this specific case?

Whether we like it or not, tracking data used for ads is the currency of the free internet. It is how things are paid for. This is like a government saying to a restaurant "You can't discriminate against people who don't want to pay you money for the food. You can ask them if they are willing to give you money for the sandwich, but if they say no, you still have to give them the sandwich"

Post by rhizome » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #356

cortesoft wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of websites that have other revenue models. Subscriptions, referral models, etc. Shouldn't people be able to choose what currency they want to pay for something in?

It's been proven over and over again that people won't pay for content that gets successfully monetised with advertising. You only have to see the howling every time someone posts a subscription only newspaper link on HN to see how vehemently opposed people are to paying for stuff like news.

Post by rhizome » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 2:04 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #233

Jach wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big use of cookies for re-authentication and carrying around a session id enabled clean URLs lacking your session id as a query param, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal to lose it. You'd need to be careful with copy-pasting URLs -- but given browsers standardized on cookies they could have standardized on a sessionId param name to filter out of copy-pastes or not even display it at all similar to Chrome's pro…

>I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL. Yeah I think that's accurate. It's a little weird sometimes reading all these articles about cookies, JavaScript, etc and I always think "But I use those things to ... give people…

Post by Mirioron » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 2:04 AM UTC

todd3834 wrote: post #222

I am not a fan of the cookie banners at all. If anything I feel like browsers should implement it as it already does with other security settings (access to location, camera, etc…) and then people can decide to allow all websites. Blacklist, whitelist whatever. Why are we making every site implement a completely unique interface with different verbiage?

Post by Mirioron » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

wsy wrote: post #186

kilburn wrote: post #19

I'm sure there's some good reason not do it, so I'll ask if anyone here knows: why doesn't the law just require some technical implementation that can be automated? Why can't the law just specify something similar to the DNT header (finer grained) and require compliance with that?

The law should lay out principles, not techniques. The GDPR works for any kind of data processing, it is not specific to browsing on the Web. The core issue is that the ~150 companies of the Oath network will effectively go out of business when they comply with GDPR. So now they try to play some games, until the fines handed out to them become too large to sustain in EU.